


My last wife

by sternflammenden



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Literary References & Allusions, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-13
Updated: 2015-07-13
Packaged: 2018-04-09 02:59:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,111
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4331229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sternflammenden/pseuds/sternflammenden
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Walder Frey brokers a marriage deal with Roose Bolton, and learns a bit about the last lady of the Dreadfort.  Not that it interests him much.</p>
            </blockquote>





	My last wife

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was inspired by a prompt by crossingwinter for the got_exchange community on LiveJournal, requesting an asoiaf AU inspired by Robert Browning's poem [My last duchess](http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/my-last-duchess). I couldn't think of anyone but the Freys and the Boltons for such a dark work. 
> 
> Just a note on canon: Walder Frey is unable to walk unassisted in the books, and is confined to a chair for all of his scenes. I've taken some liberties with his physical mobility to allow a walking tour of the Dreadfort.

The two men strolled through the house, Lord Bolton taking care to match the speed of his progress to the slower walk and cramped gait of the old man. While Walder Frey was frail in body, he was not so in mind, retaining the sharp cynicism and pert cruelty of his youth. The man was no stranger to the darker parts of life, and did not shrink from the realities of the Dreadfort. He had even had the nerve to ask where they kept the skins, and such things, of course, were never spoken of in Bolton’s household, let alone acknowledged as truth. It had taken a mere look from Roose to serve as a response, and the question was forgotten, although the denial hung in the air between them. This was not a happy household. Its mistress and her untimely demise hovered like a miasma, as did the rumors that had spread about Domeric, the heir, and his bad death. It was not a promising place for a young woman, and certainly not the sort of family where other men would be eager to broker a marriage contract. But Walder Frey was not like other men. He was, above all, shrewd, entirely lacking in sentiment that might in such other men inspire pause. He knew how the wind blew, and could feel the icy gusts from the north battering the towers at the Twins in its comfortable position in the Riverlands. Bolton’s star was rising, so they said, as the Young Wolf faltered on the field. And Walder’s family were really too numerous for much feeling to develop. One grandchild was the same as the next, and to pass one off on Bolton left him with more gold, one less mouth to feed, and an alliance that would benefit the descendants that he _did_ care about for years to come. 

The halls were drafty here, but he paid it no mind. Walder’s bones were old, but his rich clothing upholstered him well against the lack of creature comfort. As they went, Bolton pointed out, here and there, the few places of interest to him. Here was a tapestry dating from time immemorial, his savage ancestors cloaked in pink skins, poised in battle position against a woven pack of wolves from Winterfell. It was dusty, ill-cared for, and beginning to fray, but Walder could appreciate a relic. After all, he was almost one himself these days, and if Bolton wanted to put his pride in a ragged old length of fabric, he was welcome to his eccentricities. Here was a rusty dagger used to carve up some long dead lord or another, its handle a twisted figure writhing in agony. Such things were a theme with Bolton, whether for shock value or as a tongue-in-cheek warning, Walder could not say. Bolton usually showed little emotion, but his voice did quicken a bit when he described such ancestral artifacts, and his pale dead eyes sparkled slightly, despite his calm expression. 

They made their way toward the bedchambers, and Walder began to imagine some faceless granddaughter or cousin making her home here among the flaying knives, bedding down wrapped in what remained of some ancient Stark who had intruded upon his bannerman’s hospitality, and he bit back a grin. It was a loathsome place, really, devoid of any creature comfort save the bare necessities, and as Bolton raised a hand to sweep away some cobwebs, he began to wonder how long it had been since a woman had actually graced this quiet and desolate place with her presence. Bolton had been married twice over, both wives laid below in marble tombs, with nothing to show for it save an empty holdfast and a bastard son. 

“My late wife’s rooms,” Bolton said, as they passed through a narrow doorway, in that odd semi-whispered way that he had of speaking. “I thought that you might want to examine them.” They passed into a bedchamber, seemingly untouched since the former Lady Bolton had breathed her last. Walder squinted in the gloom to make sense of things, as Bolton’s torch did not give much clue as to the place’s character. “After all,” Bolton continued, “these will be your granddaughter’s rooms as well.” He reached for the chandelier, lighting the candles, and their flickering light gave Walder a sense of the place, though, like most of the illumination in the Dreadfort, they flickered in the draft that snuck through every crevice, a symptom of the chill that rose from the Wailing Water that partially flowed under the castle. Everything was orderly, surfaces carefully cleared of dust, with clean, albeit stale, rushes lining the floor. A large bed with dark red draperies lurked in a corner, the coverlet turned back as though it waited for a mistress who would never come again, and faded books and letters were neatly stacked on a writing desk placed below a shuttered window. 

Bolton noticed Walder’s interest in the latter. “My last wife would often look upon the water as she wrote to her sister in the west,” he said softly. There was no sentiment in his voice, just a dry relation of fact. “She claimed that it inspired her when there was nothing of note to relate.” He turned to the older man. “Growing up on a river, Lord Walder, you might sympathize.”

Walder grunted. He had no illusions about the Trident. It, like so much else, was just a means to an end, a means to profit, a choice location for a holdfast, its coffers weighted with gold from the tolls that he and his many ancestors had extorted from highborn fools with inflated opinions of their own importance. In the end, that was all it came down to. Money, and knowing that you’d outsmarted them even though they all thumbed their noses at you. He wondered if the late Lady Bolton had resented her lowborn house, although a dead woman’s pride meant little to him. 

“Looks fine enough for Walda,” Walder said at last. Bolton had been standing before him, waiting patiently for his impressions, his face nothing more than a mask. The man was maddening, really. Irritating, the whole business. “She’ll be glad of the room; there’s nothing quite so spacious at the Twins.”

“Your family certainly is…expansive,” Bolton murmured, picking up a crumbling sheet of parchment and letting it fall again to the desk.

Expensive too, thought Walder, his annoyance at Bolton growing. He should have thought better than to offer him the silver, assuming that a man like Roose Bolton would take another pretty doll for a wife, but he’d taken Fat Walda’s arm, appraising her as though choosing a broodmare, which honestly wasn’t far from the truth in terms of the girl’s physique and purpose, and now the man could pad his treasury with Walder’s riches. He was about to suggest that they leave when a portrait, large and veiled, caught his eye. It hung on the wall opposite the bed, the protective fabric swaying slightly in the dim light. 

“What is that?” he said, pointing. 

“Oh, that,” Bolton said, hands tugging off the cover with a brutality that Walder had not expected from so lifeless a man. “That was the last Lady Bolton.” Walder walked slowly over to the portrait to get a better view. His joints were aching and his eyes hurt from squinting. It had better be worth the effort, he thought. The wench had better be naked, or near to. But no. It was an equestrian portrait, and she was damnably fully clothed in a dark red riding habit, her gloved hands holding the proud dark head of her mount in check. Lady Bolton wasn’t a pretty woman, but the lines of her face were handsome, and her expression, two dark eyes pinning the viewer with their gaze and a mouth that threatened to smile yet refused, conveyed a coldness that he did not quite like. 

“It’s not very like,” Bolton said, replacing the muslin. “Walda will probably want to have it removed.” He allowed his hand to linger though, fingers resting against the frame, a proprietary cast to his features.

Walder didn’t doubt that. He didn’t think that it was northern custom to have your husband’s dead wives decorate your walls, although he was sure that Bolton had more disturbing things on display in forbidden places deep inside the Dreadfort.

“You should rest yourself, Lord Walder,” Bolton said then, remembering himself. “I forget sometimes how drafty it can be in this part of the castle.” He took his arm, Walder’s self control paramount not to shrink from his touch, a feigned courtesy. Wouldn’t want to give that old ghoul the satisfaction, he thought, allowing the other man to assist him on their return trip down the corridor, and back into the light.

*

He had not loved his wife. Roose Bolton had no sentimental illusions about the marriage bed, and while Bethany had come willingly enough, there was no desire in the act. Her face remained smooth, her expression blank, the only thing betraying her nonchalance a slightly flushed appearance afterwards, and when she bathed herself, and smoothed her tumbled hair into a controlled braid, there was no lingering trace that he had even been there at all. Certainly her body had betrayed her attitude, swelling with corrupt fruit, one dead child after another struggling for breath in its bed of blood, and perhaps, inheriting their mother’s lack of enthusiasm, giving up and lying still and stiff before they could even be properly considered heirs. 

He had not expected Bethany to feel any affection either. He had not chosen the woman for swooning affectation; rather, it was an opportune marriage in terms of familial alliance and needed coin. Blood ties crossed back and forth between Bolton and Ryswell since time immemorial, and her father, although vulgar, had practically thrust bags of coin at the newly-installed lord of the Dreadfort. A dowry was of little consequence to Rodrik Ryswell in the face of the prestige and connection that it purchased. What Roose had expected though, at least at the beginning, was integration. Bethany should fit perfectly into the household as if she’d been made for it, just as complementary as the curved blades that he privately brandished, or the spiked merlons on the castle that bristled on its parapet. 

But Bethany did not. Bethany was too loud, too forward, too alive, especially when she was not in his company. Roose was not jealous when he noted how her cheek colored when one of his stableboys helped his lady wife ascent her mount, but he wondered why sentiment came so easily to her in the presence of one so common, and why she did not seem to understand that such flattery was best used in service to one’s husband. It made Bethany, who had first appeared to him as a novelty to be shaped for his own means, seem commonplace. And when she’d finally given birth to a boy who’d lived, it wasn’t long until he was sent west, to keep company in the service of her sister, rather than being allowed to properly come into his heritage. It was not much of a shock when the same boy eventually sickened and died, listless blood outing itself. His wife had also lacked discernment. And the matter of his bastard was yet another insult that he had suffered silently, yet judged. It was certainly not _Bethany’s_ place to discipline the boy with harsh words; he was after all, of rougher stuff than she, and Lady Bolton should have realized that she absolved _herself_ of no crimes when she cuffed the boy about the head for failing to show her the proper respect. And when she accosted him time and again, berating him for throwing his sins in her face, for causing such insult by bringing his own by-blow to fill a place that she had been unable to provide for, he saw too easily how bad blood ran in her veins as well as in his bastard’s, their lack of control and harsh voices jangling together, blending in his mind. 

He had not mourned her when she died; he merely buried her next to her predecessor, and left her memory go to seed, just as the chambers that he’d shown to Walder Frey. 

And when the matter had been properly settled, the silver in hand, the marriage a reality, Roose watched the lady Walda as she wandered about the grounds, her girlish voice and giddy bearing an anomaly among the sepulchral spaces and hushed manners of the Dreadfort. The girl was a curiosity, really.


End file.
